Just started at a company recently, and there is a preexisting problem that I could use some help with. Somebody please tell me there is a low impact fix for this:
My company's website is structured so all of the main links used on the nav are listed as .asp pages. All the canonical stuff. However, for "SEO Purposes," we have a number of similar (not exact) pages in .html on the same topic on our site.
So, for example, let's say we're a bakery. The main URL, as linked in the nav, for our Chocolate Cakes, would be http://www.oursite.com/chocolate-cakes.asp. This differentiates the page from our other cake varieties, such as http://www.oursite.com/pound-cakes.asp and http://www.oursite.com/carrot-cakes.asp.
Alas, fully indexed in Google with links existing only in our sitemap, we also have:
http://www.oursite.com/chocolate-cakes.html
http://www.oursite.com/chocolatecakes.html
http://www.oursite.com/cakes-chocolate.html
This seems CRAZY to me, because wouldn't this split our search results 4 ways?
Am I right in assuming this is destroying the rankings of our canonical pages? I want to change this, but problem is, none of the content is the same on any of the variants, and some of these pages rank really well - albeit mostly for long tail keywords instead of the good, solid keywords we're after.
So, what I'm asking you guys is: How do I burn these .html pages to the ground without completely destroying our rankings for the other keywords? I want to 301 those pages to our canonical nav URLs but, because of the wildly different content, I'm afraid that we could see a heavy drop in search traffic. Am I just being overly cautious?
Thanks in advance!
